Over the past decade, vending machine manufacturers and software developers have created new and innovative vending equipment and applications in response to market needs and vending operator demands. These innovations have been, for the most part, adopted by the beverage and food vending industry. Also, vending machines are now used with a much wider variety of products as compared to traditional food and beverage vending.
These trends have been influenced by the accelerating rate of technological innovation in the software and electronic and electro-mechanical component industries. The availability of new technologies has given vending machine manufacturers and software developers the tools to address many of the requirements of vending operators. Advances in software and electronics are now enabling the use of computer controls and data acquisition systems directly inside a vending machine. Some of the latest vending machines now make it possible for vending machine operators to download sales, inventory, and machine operating information on-site onto portable computers. Although these computerized systems make it easier for operators to gather and analyze data, they generally do not provide real time capabilities that are needed to make a major impact on overall vending operations.
There currently exist various remote data capture systems in the vending industry. Examples of such systems include the systems disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,608,643; 4,766,548 and 4,412,292. Most of the conventional systems make use of point-to-point data acquisition systems that use a wireless data transmission system to receive and send information from/to individual vending machines. Some of the systems use wireline data transmission systems (e.g. telephone lines) while others use wireless transmission systems (e.g. cellular)
Systems that implement wireless point-to-point communications using long-range wireless transceivers at each vending machine often have a significant limitation in that they cannot be made to function properly in locations that do not have a clear RF path to an associated central base station outside the building, perhaps even miles away. For example, if a vending machine is located deep inside a building, the ability to transmit/receive data to/from the outside of the building is hampered by signal attenuation caused by the building's structure. On the other hand, wireline systems that, by their nature, are immune to in-building reliability problems typically suffer from high infrastructure costs given that dedicated wire must be drawn to each vending machine in order to create the required point-to-point data link. Establishing a wireline system is often a difficult task and frequently limits the ability to move associated vending machines from one location to another location. Thus, conventional remote data capture systems generally do not adequately fill the needs of vending machine operators for remote data acquisition, transmission and analysis.
Some conventional remote data acquisition systems employ a point-to-point wireless communication link to retrieve information from and send information to a plurality of remote devices. Further, wide-area networks (WAN) are often formed from a plurality of local area networks (LANs), and such LANs are often interconnected using a wireline or wireless data transmission system. In other technical areas, wireline and wireless transceivers have been used for local area network communication. For example, power line networks are used in a variety of applications such as in the implementation of “smart building” functions, including the systems disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,976,264 and 4,763,104. Yet wireline and wireless LAN communications have generally not been implemented for purposes of data acquisition or vending machine management.
In general, conventional remote data acquisition systems that implement WAN/LAN architectures for collecting data from distributed equipment (e.g. vending machines) use data collected at a predefined time during the day to generate reports that will be used to drive specific actions to be taken until the next data collection period arrives. In the case of vending operators, this type of architecture has prevented their field operations personnel from carrying with them, or generating on demand while in the field, the latest and most accurate reports based on real or near real-time data collected from the vending machines. In other applications, handheld wireless computers allow field operations personnel to interact with their enterprise data on a real-time data to mitigate this issue. Yet this type of handheld wireless technologies have generally not been implemented for the purposes of data acquisition from field equipment or vending machine management. In addition, this type of handheld communications technology has not been generally implemented for the purposes of controlling field equipment to perform service or other functions such as financial transactions (e.g. purchase of product).